Teaching 10 year olds to code using the MVC pattern

Teaching 10 year olds to code using the MVC pattern

Teaching ADLIBS

TKP Tips: Teaching the SmallBasic ADLIBS recipe

The parts of the ADLIBS recipe are as follows:

1) Recipe – guided line-by-line translation, to teach core concepts. For ADLIBS, you are building on what the kids learned in all of the previous drawing recipes (core IDE and language concepts such as objects, methods, etc…) and For loops. In this recipe we work on mastering the idea of variables, strings and string concatenation. Also we include MessageBox API. The core recipe is QWF808. The cheat sheet is NXK897. Below is the teacher video for the core recipe.

2) Variation – instructor – led verbal refactoring and modifications to add concepts to the solution. In this variation you will be teaching new concepts that relate to MVC. Specifically, we recommend that you break the variation in into two parts. The first part introduces the Parser.Merge object. This is intended to replace the string concatenation. This variation also introduces a type of Array (we refer to it as a map). We made a video to help you teach this below. We recommend that you rename the original objects from <objectName> to <objectName1> to help the students to understand the transition.

The second part of the variation introduces the idea of a Viewer, which can display an RTF file. The idea is that the RTF file will serve as a formatting template. What you are really teaching here is the MVC (or model-view-controller) pattern. Also it teaches the students about working with the file system. Below is a video showing how to teach this part.

3) Recap – presented by the instructors, re-do the recipe to reinforce core concepts. You’ll want to particularly emphasize common mistakes with the string manipulation syntax.

4) Quiz – There is no quiz for this recipe at this time.

5) Homework – There is no homework for this recipe at this time.

6) Xtras - There are no Xtras at this time.

We are really excited about the growth of TKP. We welcome feedback on the how we can make these videos better for you as TKP teachers.